"Where is all the good writing about games?"
…still prevalent in contemporary games.
“It’s better than no fat representation at all. But that bar’s so low we had to dig out a basement for it to live in.” Continuing on, we’re featuring a pair of pieces that unpack …
Aesthetics and Ideologies
…me entertained and engaged and even social in spite of it all. I feel grown in good, hard ways. I feel grateful.”
Hold onto that thread about bodies for a moment. Our next featured piece this week sees Ryan Stevens examine how Samus Aran’s body has been coded for violence over the course of the Metroid franchise on multiple levels, with things coming to a head in the recent Metroid Dread.
…indie game devs are using games to explore their queer identity | Gayming Magazine Eliana Zebro talks to developers making the characters and stories they want to see themselves in.
“Browser games permit a degree of deviation from the policing of LGBT lives and desires, but in the end, corporations and States still yield massive power and influence.”
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…us think about ourselves and our selves, as players, as bodies, as travellers, as people.
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…Ruminations on Ruin
Next up, we’ve got two pieces making sense of two new games that centre around abandoned urban spaces, be it the run-down ruins in Kirby and the Forgotten Land or the more recent rapturing in Ghostwire: Tokyo. “Buried beneath layers of concrete …
…occasional shopkeeps).
“It is easy to strip agency from a being you do not consider even there. Tokyo was once the domain of those whose clothes now litter the streets. Few acknowledged the existence of something beyond the tangible. The few that did, like KK and his fellow investigator Rinko, fight to preserve a way of life, if not an entirely balanced one. Lack of acknowledgement is poor inoculation for that which seeks little else than to reclaim the city now that its keepers are reduced to floating blue bodies. But the truth is that it is…
…survives a frostbitten Canadian wilderness while surviving a sweltering London heatwave, and reflects on the catharsis of games which externalize and literalize our ever-dwindling bodily resources and needs.
“My takeaway was that it’s draining having an invisible illness and communicating that experience to others — thrusting the boringness onto them, like listening to a song through a wall, hearing about somebody else’s useless dream, or spending all this energy convincing other bodies that this body is real. And I found it suddenly, blatantly, exciting and meaningful to see a character’s health visualised in stats on the screen…
…to drop the baggage, branch out, and come into their own.
“I, a human woman with blood and bones, do not know what it feels like for an axle to break, but I do know how it feels when a shoulder is torn from its socket. The slow violence of vehicle combat becomes intelligible through a mostly human body.”
Pale and Paradise
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…gold leaf before being dropped in our waiting hands.”
And then there’s Fortnite, where that’s almost the point.
“Fortnite embraces the disconnect from reality to cater to larger and more niche audiences simultaneously as it grows. The bodies of the children who lose in Fornite don’t pile up in Lazy Lagoon. But the origins remain intact. Fear is a weapon and Fortnite’s weaponization of our limited…
…That Systemic Racism Coming Along
It would be nice to say that 2022 was the year we finally turned a corner on race representation in the games industry, but it’s almost like these problems are structural. Still, there are positives to focus on as well. …